The other day, I decided it was time a few of my non-gaming friends should meet the Wii. After all, they know what I do (write about games...) and they expressed a natural curiosity about it, having seen it all over TV. I packed up the best, most accessible stuff – Wii Sports, Guitar Hero III,
Boom Blox, Super Smash Bros. Brawl and an old Gamecube favorite: Mario Kart: Double Dash. All of them share the hallmarks of being simple, fun, recognizable (except maybe Boom Blox, which I touted as “the Steven Spielberg game!”) and instantly playable.
Surely, Nintendo had something to do with their collective interest, with its “everyone’s a gamer” shtick, and insane amounts of mainstream media exposure. It’s no longer entirely nerdy to play games and hey, if Grandma, the tragically hip 21-year-old and the gurgling toddler can all enjoy it, everyone can! And yes, my friends were about to experience that first hand.
It was exciting – I was going to get to be the gamer of the bunch, dangling the gateway drug that would surely lure them in to our fantastical gaming world. I was also going to get to play the role of expert and teacher, sort of like the Zen master giving first lessons to an apprentice. It was going to be great.
Well, it wasn’t. You see, I have this girlfriend; lets call her “K”, who has an almost-supernatural ability to play games well, despite the fact that she’s barely touched a controller since the 16-bit era, when she was still a kid and all kids played videogames. She knows Mario, she knows Sonic, and she knows Zelda, but she looks at me like I’ve just beamed down from Mars if I mention anything about the current console generation or the term “downloadable content”.
I thought nothing of her years-dormant gaming experience at first. Here I was, the ambassador from the gaming world, eager to ease her back in. How was I supposed to know that “K” was obscenely competitive and an insanely fast learner? She picked up Mario Kart in about two laps, and was getting the timing of Guitar Hero inside of playing her first song. On Wii Sports, she actually pushed into my Wii-mote as I was about to swing for a pitch. She had the spirit of a warrior, I thought, again channeling my inner Zen master. It was time to move on to Boom Box.
The game began innocently enough. We were shooting, giggling and having a fine old time. I thought of myself as a pretty decent Boom Blox player, having nursed an obsession with the title earlier in the summer and a naturally talented (so I like to think) throwing arm. I explained the rules and the basic mechanics, demonstrating as one would with a child. But then something happened – she learned. In fact she got very good, very fast and soon she was beating me – beating me by a large margin.
